The Grimoire of Grimalkin

Book excerpt: The Grimoire of Grimalkin was conceived during passionate affairs with French fin-de-siècle literature and Russian poets from the 1920s of the obscure kind. At the same time, the poet was conducting amorous relations with Old English fairy tales, and the English language itself, its past, present and future. Roots were plundered, whilst flirting with Plato’s notions of the thing itself versus the image conjured up by the word. There is a strong strain of the Eastern courtly love tradition, too – the wretched, tortured lover, but it is never quite clear who the object of love is. Wrapped in necromancy, invocations and references to the Devil, The Grimoire of Grimalkin is a baroque excursion into language taking Bakhtin’s ideas of polyglossia, Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome model and other postmodern philosophies and running amok with them. The work is rife with literary, film, and television references, and a particular debt is owed to The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There is a feeling of an articulate medieval sensibility at work here. Fraught with nightmares, superstitions and mythology. In the 16th century “grimoires” were spell books written by occultists. In Akhtar’s Grimoire there is a channelling of sorts, of talking in tongues, of black magic, through the use of language of all guises. Obsolete or “dead” words mingle with contemporary British slang, “Indo-European roots” appear harmonizing with malapropisms and puns. The Devil makes several appearances in reponse to wild invocation, perhaps to enamour lovers. Any notions of “meaning” are consistently challenged in Akhtar’s primordial forge, where language melts into a bubbling cauldron of delicious trickery, sex and death, magick and mayhem and, above all, love. This is a work of contemporary Gothic, with a punk core and an anarchic sense of humour.